I like Slackware, it's simple, it's robust, it's fast. But I always felt there was some lacking in Slackware when it came to desktop use--I was never able to put my finger on it exactly, but using Slackware for a desktop, although it works just fine, seemed like it (or I) was out of place.

I also disagree on his opinion to kick out AbiWord "because we have OpenOffice". Some people only want a word processor (not the rest), or want to use a featureful word processor on older machines. That's where AbiWord fits in.

It would be the same as to say, let's kick out IceWM because we have KDE.

And it was a pretty lite edition,geared for old slow boxes.It had a text based installer that was on the line of free bsd,from there i dallied with Peanut Linux,which seemed way nicer,but then I found Mepis which is my current favorite amoungst the smaller Linuxes,with a nice graphical installer running from a bootable cd,and the ability to apt-get anything else you want once installed,there's very little there not to like!

How did the author come to the conclusion that this product was any good at all. It seemed to me like he had mountains of problems for a distro that provided an older kernel than he wanted, and didn't have a number of apps that he did want. I guess it 'seemed fast' whatever that means.

bman08 asked why I gave Vl a good grade when there were things I wanted "fixed." I'll try to explain. Sure, I'd like a 2.6 kernel, sure I want the silly bugs fixed, but recall this is an RC, fancy beta. I'm sure they'll fix those. The product is darn near ready, if you ask me. Just those minor annoyances to correct, the worst of them being the swap issue and the video issue. But neither were something insurmountable. Even a n00b with Google access could have fixed those within 5 minutes, I'm pretty confidant of that. The swap issue *has* to be a simple oversight or a flaw in the installer. No other explanation makes sense. As for the kernel version and the modem icon deal... Those are nice "want list" stuff. No biggie.

AbiWord: My opinion is that you don't need it, OOo is just as fast and better. But if there are those that need it, it's a small program so I'd be willing to ignore it. That's not a deal breaker either.

As for the final grade of "B", I'm pretty lenient when everything else is as good as it was.

I originally tried Vector in 2003 precisely because it was supposed to be small, and I only had a piece of old junk to install it on.

The people in the forum were nice and helpful, and I got it working with all my hardware.

But I eventually got Debian installed too and stuck with it.

I tried Peanut Linux in 2003 as well, and while it looked kind of cool to a Linux newbie, even on an old piece of junk, it seemed to have all kinds of trouble. But it did have xrick installed by default, which was a big plus!

I tend to shy away from Slapt-get and/or swaret since I have personally hosed machines with those tools, and seen other's hose them as well. They're a great idea, but if you make one mistake you're a goner.

I'd like to know what strict advantages VL has over Slackware. I'm running Slackware-current with a 2.6 kernel and everything was a breeze to setup. Don't get me wrong, VL looks nice....i just wonder what features should tempt me away from slack?

Hi all,
I have SOHO installed on a slow 400MHz box with 128M of memory (1998 vintage Compaq Box).

All in all the VL SOHO 5 is a great OS. Again, it was mentioned already but the speed is awesome. The only other OS that resembles the same speed on my box is an alpha distribution out of Germany named CCux Linux. I am not sure what it is based on but it is fast. Maybe it is a source base distro.

I have tried all the distro's from Gentoo to Red Hat and all in between. I am very impressed with VL's and the solutions it has to offer. I do wish they would provide Open Office by default. However, Open Office is easy enough to install.
Just my 2 cents,
Paul ;}

I also question the AbiWord dig. If you haven't tried AbiWord 2.2.x, you're basing your decision on incomplete information: AbiWord is really nice now. I've never seen a system where OO.o came even close to being as fast as AbiWord, even with the preloader installed (Windows), and AbiWord does it without a preloader. It also can sometimes deal with Word files that choke OO.o.

(disclaimer: I do some qa and art for AbiWord. Only because I feel it's a great program, though)

VL comes as SOHO, and as a small (200MB) "dynamite" ISO. On "dynamite" the OOo is obviously not applicable, and besides that just try running OOo plus some dictionaries loaded at some 128MB RAM box... where is your fast system? Actually it may not move at all!
Actually I do not use Abiword at all either, and I prefer Slack and Arch over Vector, but IMHO Vector Linux is a very nice and very well thought out distro.

your ramblings about the xorg issues would have turned away most people who were interested in reading what this distro has to offer.
You could have summed it up in one or two lines instead of most of the first page.

RC is not the same as beta (unless your company is Yellowtab). There are 3 basic parts of software development: alpha, where software is not feature complete, has quite a few major bugs, and you will probably have a hard time getting it to run right -- if at all, beta where the software is closing in on feature completeness but still has quite a few bugs to work out (though few major ones like in alpha, but a majority of medium to small bugs that only arise in few instances) and of course Release Candidate (RC) -- these builds are feature complete and should have no major bugs. If everything goes well and no one finds any bugs during the testing period of the RC, then that build becomes the final and it is shipped/released.

This is the general practice of course and is not done the same in all companies/organizations/projects (again the example of Yellowtab Zeta).

I was kinda interested in Vector Linux but this kinda seems disheartening that it has that many issues in an RC release. I guess I'll just stick to plain Slack for my projects.

I tend to shy away from "rm" and/or "fdisk" since I have personally hosed machines with those tools, and seen other's hose them as well. They're a great idea, but if you make one mistake you're a goner.

Lets be specific and not make the age of mistake of the ad hominem that one thing breaks a box and the other by categorical association is also assumed to do the same. Also, I hope you submitted bug reports as a courtesy.

Ad hominem? No. Truth. I have fried installations by using both those tools to update to -current. Both reduced the machine to non-booting lumps. It's not an attack, what I said, unless you think PatV's opinion of them is an attack too.